Strawman

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Strawman Agent Reference Architecture (DARPA ISO
coABS Program - Draft 11-30-98) Craig
Thompson Object Services and Consulting, Inc.
(OBJS) thompson_at_objs.com, http//www.objs.com
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Agent Reference Architecture Requirements

• Target operational requirements
• Networked society where everything is alive --
  every software artifact, information source, and
  device is connected and running in parallel.
  Humans and agents connect to the agent grid
  anytime from anywhere and get the information and
  capability they need. Enable teams led by humans
  and staffed by agents.
• Intelligent automation -- easier application
  connectivity where networks of agents
  self-organized at run-time. Reduce the 60 of
  time in command and control systems spent
  manipulating stovepipes incrementally replace
  stovepipes.
• Connect the 40B worth of DoD equipment that
  currently only interoperates with one or two
  other components, permitting better knowledge
  sharing. Another example is a process
  improvement in factory 1 is broadcast immediately
  to factories 2..N.
• Agent-enable object and web applications to
  reconfigure as new data and function is added to
  the system. Scale to millions of agents so
  agents are pervasive and information and
  computation is not restricted to machine or
  organization boundaries if one agent goes down,
  another takes its place add capability
  modularly stable, scaleable, evolvable,
  reliable, secure, survivable, ...

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Characteristics of Agents
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System Concept View
Agents the Global Software Grid
Relevant Theory

• speech acts, conversations/dialogs
• ontologies
• game theory
• economic markets
• patterns and protocols
• planning case-based reasoning
• learning
• KBMS
• workflow
• dynamic DBMS
• simulation
• architecture description languages
• distributed AI
• component technology
• Web architectures
• frameworks (Jini)
• OO middleware services (OMA/ORB)
• network management and QoS

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Architecture Principle separation of
concerns deconstructionist view - what can you
take away and still have an agent system
Agent Architecture Details

• policy, management
• resource dial

ALP, HLA, IA
GRID
federates

• AGENT SYSTEM
• single vs. multi-agent

• heterogeneous
• computing environ.
• agent systems
• ACLs
• content languages
• ontologies
• policies
• services
• open world assumption

systemic grid features
common services

• ensembles
• of agents
• teams, peers, contracting,
• org. responsibility
• roles, capabilities,
• mutual beliefs
• hierarchy
• conversational policies

• societies
• closed vs. open, communities of interest

• agent properties kinds
• communication capability
• computation capability
• by role in system
• information agent
• data sources
• interface agent
• NL
• fisheye view
• task agent
• web agent
• middleware agent
• mobile agent, itinerary
• social, personality, motivation, forgetting
• intelligent agent

distribution messaging svcs agent life cycle -
start, stop, checkpoint, name service event
monitoring leasing, compensation catalog
services, registry/repository
register, offer/accept/decline publish,
subscribe trading, matchmaking,
advertising, negotiating, brokering,
yellow pages security authenticate
encrypt access control lists firewall
CIA model agent suspects transactions persistence
query, profile (of metadata) data
fusion replication groups
multicast (scarce) resource mgmt, allocate,
deallocate, monitor, local, global
optimization, load balancing, negotiation for
resources scheduling time, geo-location rules,
constraints planning property list versioning,
config
autonomous decentralized

• control, coordination,
• multi-agent synchronization
• cooperation, competition

I3 BADD AICE
OMG JTF Jini
scalability
adaptation, evolution via market model, ...
licensing cost

• ONTOLOGY
• ontolingua, OKBC
• metadata representations
• interests, locations, availability, capability,
  price/cost
• XML and web object models

mobility
secure, trust
IA
speech acts ACL - KQML, FIPA ACL, OAA ICL
survivability

• planning
• reactive
• goal interactions
• discrete vs continuous
• constraints
• iterative, revision
• workflow

• infrastructure
• primitives
• reflection
• serialization
• threads
• interceptors
• proxies
• filters
• multicast
• wrappers
• legacy sys
• data sources

evolvability
EDCS

• missing
• views
• MOP

reliabile

• QoS
• accuracy
• priorities

Quorum

• learning
• by example
• ...

More common services instrumenting,
logging caching queuing routing,
rerouting pedigree, drill down translation ...
time-constrained

• content languages
• KIF, FOL, IDL, RDF

Architecture WG in Pittsburg Control WG
in Pittsburg Interoperability WG in
Pittsburg red Sun Jini green other DARPA
programs
DDB
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Architecture Issues

• What are agents? - code and data packets that are
  autonomous, adaptive, cooperative, mobile,
  interoperable We want all these properties in
  future agent-based systems. We need experience
  building systems with these properties.
• Pervasiveness - How do we insure that the
  architecture stays lite-weight for wide-spread
  adoption.
• Embracing heterogeneity - We must piggyback agent
  systems on already pervasive infrastructure like
  ORBs, the Web, email, and DBMS systems. We must
  identify the specific kinds of heterogeneity we
  want agent system architectures to support.
• Separation of concerns
• agent-agent separation - can agents access each
  others state directly
• agent-service separation - do agents implement
  the long list of services that the grid provides
  or is that done via underlying component-based
  middleware?
• grid-agent separation - agents are autonomous but
  they cooperate and compete for resources within
  the software grid. The grid provides some global
  systemic properties and some basic shared
  services. Is there an explicit grid or is it
  implicit in the way agents interact with each
  other? Are some services (like planning)
  optionally distributed into agents or are they
  available from the grids planing service? Can
  new services be autoloaded into a grid that does
  not have them?
• Semantic interoperability, ontology - do
  ontologies scale? How do they extend class
  libraries?
• Licensing - Agents, data sources, and component
  software need an economic model so broad
  communities can get value from them. A model of
  licensing might be critical to success in the
  large.
• Agent communication language (ACL) - Is the ACL
  compositional and extensible so one can define
  new speech acts from existing ones? How many
  speech acts is enough? 20 or 5000?
• Control points - where are the control points
  where different control algorithms might be
  substituted into the architecture
• Grid federation issues - How are software grids
  federated - flat versus hierarchical models? If
  different grids contain different policy choices
  or different services, how does that affect
  agents communicating across grid boundaries? Can
  we add new services and -ilities to a grid once
  it is deployed? how transparent is addition or
  subtraction of services and ilities
• Coordination - Insure Agent Reference
  Architecture augments DARPA ISO ATAIS
  architecture. Provide template for next
  generation unified OMG, FIPA, and W3C agent
  standards. Insure that reference implementations
  (toolkits) exist and are widely available.